From my new book, Poems of Ancient Rome and Greece, available in paperback on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as eBook on Kindle, Nook, and Apple Books:  https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Ancient-Greece-Christopher-Saitta/dp/B0DS6933HB?ref=astauthor_dp  

My mother the sea,
She woke my sandy eyes,
Just to tell me she had to leave,
Draw past the markets where the fish are sun-dried,
Snarled by the coral-rough hands of divers deep.

My mother the sea,
She left her running tab
Of the grocer’s choicest greens,
Thumbed the velamentous rinds and spiny scarola,
Her xylem and phloem are the slow moving cruciferousness of a breeze.

My mother the sea,
Charwoman of tides,
Who dips and delves upon her knees,
Who scrubs her brothel-coves with chamber lye,
Cyprian mistress of the salt-stained sheets.

I have looked for you, mother,
A scugnizzo amid the striped awnings of the marketplace
~ like sails to the sky ~
Where the fishmongers hawk their pride
Of conch, cavallo, and black sea bream.

I have looked for you, mother,
Walked sun-forged along the boardwalk,
Amid the neon-mascara of signs,
Hand-in-hand with only the ladyfingers of salt and vinegar fries,
Toward the crisp syllabub of pebbles and sand.

A beach is window-warmth spread free, cosmopolitan,
The longeur of eyes crushed in the glass-dust of cities.
And in the sputtering of the frosted spume of tides,
Held broken seashells in my hands like broken needles,
Heard the pump-click of the ventilator through your mask of sand.

My mother the sea,
A naked convalescent,
Whose ever-turnings have taken
A turn for the worse.
Who will know her by her death, who but me?

lover of love's long lost history
you are so intrinsically dear to me
and i know you can hear the beat
when our hands go blistering

i love the neapolitan but not naples
listen to how the city sings like the others
but she buys time and barely bothers
to remove her appropriating staples

she is a reflection
of a reflection
of a reflection
of a reflection

but you, my dear neapolitans,

how holistically human you happen to be
and what a human thing to do
to braid oneself with a few
ventricles of other hearts unseen

you are not special insofar as you are human
and the home you make mistakes you
for a permanent resident, assumes you
are a planted person whose sole purpose is bloomin

but you are dynamic, not static
you do not live in someone's attic
you move around, the ground beneath you
isn't bequeathed to staying beneath you,

you

keep moving and loving and all of the aboving
because our love isn't something
that can be taken away by a location change
or how 21,000 hearts are arranged

Just moments after the eye stops staring insatiably at us
You can hear the flicking on of all those machines
As you walk down the flooded streets so slow
The violinists pull the strings, and on they go
One to the left of us, three to the right
Two in front of us, and none to the behind

The conductors swing their arms
The symphony clangs, alarms
Lighting up the homes and the tv screens
Chilling the musicians, and the shaky beams
Walk around some more, you'll hear one hit a low C
While you slosh through the street's home sea

He was
either a
Captain or
Tory to
lead river
by Alamo
where want
toiled much
and delay
soiled so
much together
unfortunately his
somber face
many that
Hasici died
and San
Antonio implored
diocese while
Serra's Chapel
also became
an acorn
for fruit
and burial
for Franciscan
outward envy
of mission
for peace.